A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms

The Base Case

Let’s continue our walkthrough of the countdown function. We’ll skip a few steps for brevity…

Step #21: We call countdown(0).

Step #22: We print number (i.e., 0) to the console.

Step #23: We call countdown(-1).

Step #24: We print number (i.e., -1) to the console.

Uh oh. As you can see, our solution is not perfect, as we’ll end up stuck with infinitely printing negative numbers.

To perfect our solution, we need a way to end our countdown at 0 and prevent the recursion from continuing on forever.

We can solve this problem by adding a conditional statement that ensures that if number is currently 0, we don’t call countdown() again:

function countdown(number) {
  console.log(number);
  if(number === 0) {
    return;
  } else ...